Mabel Bocchi, icon of Italian women’s basketball, died at 72

Mabel Bocchi, considered the greatest Italian basketball player ever and one of our country’s first very popular sportswomen, died this morning at her home in San Nicola Arcella, in the province of Cosenza. She was 72 years old, having been born in Parma on May 26, 1953, to an Italian father and an Argentine mother. Her full name was Liliana Mabèl Gracielita Bocchi. She had a brother, Norberto, a bridge champion, and a sister, Ambra, also a former Serie A player and now a coach in Scalea. She spent her teenage years in Irpinia, where her family had moved for work, and it was from Irpinia that her basketball career began.

Martino Davidi

In fact, she made her debut at the age of 15 in the Serie B in Avellino Basketball, a formation that she helped bring to the Serie A already in her first season, at the end of which she was bought by GEAS of Sesto San Giovanni, a team of which she became the highest symbol. With the Sesto team, Bocchi, who was 1.86 tall and a center, won 8 scudetti in 9 seasons between 1970 and 1978, the last 5 of them consecutive, and an Italian Cup in 1973. But her masterpiece, in her very last year at GEAS, was winning, with the rank of captain, the 1978 Champions Cup, beating the Czechoslovakian Sparta Praga in the final in Nice.

That was the first time in which an Italian women’s team in any sport won a continental title and, as far as basketball was concerned, in which a women’s club not from the countries of the East became champions of Europe. The victory was also the opportunity for Bocchi, backed by other internationally prominent female colleagues as well as clubmates such as Lella Battistella and Rosetta Bozzolo, to push forward economic claims concerning, among other things, the reduction of the wage gap and restrictions on access to medical treatment on par with their male colleagues.

She retired from the business in 1982 after playing three seasons for FIAT Torino and one for Basket Femminile Milano. In addition to being a great basketball player, she was a multifaceted character: having graduated from Isef in 1974, in 1978, when she was still playing, she began her work as a sports journalist on television, participating in several editions of Domenica Sportiva in the 1980s, and later collaborated with Corriere della Sera and Gazzetta dello Sport. She was offered to do a photo shoot for Playboy but she declined. Some will also remember her brief appearance in the 1985 comedy film “Lui è peggio di me” with Renato Pozzetto and Adriano Celentano.